Recent news

Emails that are encrypted as
they’re routed from sender to receiver are like sealed envelopes, and less
vulnerable to snooping—whether by bad actors or through government
surveillance—than postcards. But some email is more secure than others. So to
help you better understand whether your emails are protected by encryption,
we’ve launched Safer Email, a new section in the
Transparency Report.

Today, we’re updating our Transparency Report for the ninth time. This updated
Report details the number of government requests we received for user
information in criminal investigations during the second half of 2013.
Government requests for user information in criminal cases have increased by
about 120 percent since we first began publishing these numbers in 2009.

Last year we filed a lawsuit asking the FISA Court to let us disclose the
number of FISA requests we may receive and how many users/accounts they
include. We’d previously secured permission to publish information about
National Security Letters, and FISA requests were the only remaining type of
demands excluded from our report. Today, for the first time, our report on
government requests for user information encompasses all of the requests we
receive, subject only to delays imposed by the DoJ regarding how quickly we can
include certain requests in our statistics.

We launched the Transparency Report in 2010 to provide hard evidence of how
laws and policies affect access to information online. Today, for the eighth
time, we’re releasing new numbers showing requests from governments to remove
content from our services. From January to June 2013, we received 3,846
government requests to remove 24,737 pieces of content—a 68 percent increase
over the second half of 2012.

In a year in which government surveillance has dominated the headlines, today
we’re updating our
Transparency Report for the eighth time. Since we began sharing these
figures with you
in 2010, requests from governments for user information have increased by
more than 100 percent. This comes as usage of our services continues to grow,
but also as more governments have made requests than ever before. And these
numbers only include the requests we’re allowed to publish.

Today we filed an amended petition
[PDF] in the U.S. Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court. This petition mirrors the requests made to
Congress and the President by our industry and civil liberties groups in a
letter
earlier this year. Namely, that Google be allowed to publish detailed
statistics about the types (if any) of national security requests we receive
under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, including Section 702. Given
the important public policy issues at stake, we have also asked the court to
hold its hearing in open rather than behind closed doors. It’s time for more
transparency.

We have launched a new
section on our Transparency Report that will shed more light on the sources of
malware and phishing attacks. You can now learn how many people see Safe
Browsing warnings each week, where malicious sites are hosted around the world,
how quickly websites become reinfected after their owners clean malware from
their sites, and other tidbits we’ve surfaced.

Other reports

Several other companies disclose data about government requests, including: